Announcing Web Search

Re: Announcing Web Search

I am sorry you feel that way. It truly is our intention to make this a win-win.

I have personally talked to quite a few people and we have been monitoring the email address as well. The vast majority of the feedback has been very positive. Since the announcement, we have gotten dozens of email from societies and organizations asking us to include their sites.

Interestingly, I haven't seen one request to not be crawled in the email so far. We got a few requests on this board from the alpha launch last fall and, from the conversations here, I assume you and jaws1964 will not want your sites included. That's totally fine.

BTW, I put the name of the bot on the first post in this thread under the section "How do I prevent Ancestry.com from indexing my site". The bot is called ancestrybot. We chose the name to make it easy to recognize and block or allow as people desire.

We are trying to make this a positive thing for publishers. In order to get the maximum number of people to these websites, we have made it totally free - no registration, no subscription required. We also put a link to the URL directly in the search results so that people can get straight to the URL. We provide attribution and links to the website in multiple places. These were all things that publishers told us they wanted.

I think the proof of whether this is good or bad for publishers will take time. I certainly expect it will be positive and most of the people I have talked to have expressed the same belief.

I wouldn't work on this project if I felt it was dishonest or a bad thing for other websites. As a genealogist, I appreciate the work that societies and individuals do and don't want to harm them in any way. Fortunately, the people I work with at Ancestry.com feel the same way.

I appreciate your sharing your thoughts and concerns here. I wish we were able to ease your mind on this. If this ends up being a good experience for other websites, as I believe it will, perhaps you may change your mind at some point in the future.

If you want to make sure we don't include your site, please feel free to post the URL here or send it to me in email at websearch@ancestry.com.